The management of data is important. For instance, management of unstructured data containing files that have limited relationships to other data, such as documents, email, reports, letters, research notes, presentations, and intellectual property documents represent about 80% of all data. This file data may spread among many systems and departments and migrate between systems as a data storage infrastructure grows. As a result of data migrations or consolidation of data, many files are labeled as being owned by “administrators,” which makes it difficult to establish who in an enterprise actually owns the data.
Identifying data ownership is critical for a number of information technology initiatives, and lack of data owner identification can become a barrier to large scale data remediation and management. For instance, ownership of a file is important for control and maintenance purposes. Each file has an owner, which may correspond to a user name defined in a computing system. Ownership of a file is useful for showing who edited the file, and also for providing control mechanisms determining who can access the file depending on access permissions. In addition, accurate ownership of a file is important for determining how a file should be maintained, such as when implementing deletion and archiving policies. Further, accurate ownership provides for proper billing for services associated with the file.
Conventional methods do not provide an accurate picture of the ownership of a file, thereby leading to poor access control of a file. For instance, previous systems rely on using Windows File Security application programming interfaces (APIs). In particular, a conventional system may use “Created By” information to discover ownership of a file. However, the information provided in these APIs and specifically in the “Created By” field is insufficient for fully defining ownership of a file, and may possibly provide inaccurate ownership information.
Further, ownership of a file may change over time, and these changes are not reflected in the “Created By” field. In a typical use case, username-1 creates a file for use in a particular project-1. Six months later username-1 is transferred to another project-2 and no longer is working on project-1. As such, username-1 no longer has need to access the file, but other users still working on project-1 will continue to access the file. In this case, while username-1 created the file and is still considered the owner, he or she no longer is intimately associated with the file and cannot provide current access control over the file.
In one specific case, improper ownership may lead to unauthorized access of a file, as access permissions of an outdated and improper owner of a file are employed, and may provide access to the file by previously authorized, but currently unauthorized users. As such, instead of implementing access permissions of the current and proper owner of a file, access permissions of an outdated and improper owner of a file are employed, and may provide access to the file by unauthorized users. This may result in improper archiving of a file by an unauthorized user of the file, and also may result in improper deletion of an important file by an unauthorized user.